


Blink

by Starrik



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gen, Original Fiction, Original work - Freeform, Sci-Fi, Short Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-08-18 20:43:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8175407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starrik/pseuds/Starrik
Summary: An astronomer makes an astonishing discovery for the second time in his life.





	

He hated that star. It was pretty unreasonable to hate a star, but Idris didn’t give two shits about what was reasonable any more. He hated it, and if it disappeared from the night sky forever he would be quite okay with that.

Except, of course, that it disappearing was the problem in its entirety. Idris fitted his eye to the very end of the intimidatingly expensive telescope, and looked out through the inky black void to his star. No, it fucking wasn’t his star, it was his nemesis. It was his pride and his downfall.

The star winked at him.

“Fuck you,” Idris whispered.

It didn’t twinkle like the other stars did, the damn thing winked out of existence for a full second, and then reappeared in the night sky. He’d nearly been laughed out of astronomy as a science when he’d first sent in his discovery for publication. Idris has cracked, they said. He’s calling satellites stars now.

But the laughing stopped as more and more people turned their telescopes to the star that stopped existing every now and then, and Idris Pellano was catapulted into fame, inside the community and out.

Blink, people started calling his rival. And then they started to ask the question he hated more than any other in the world, scientists and laymen alike.

“Why?”

“Why does it blink like that?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Why can’t you tell us?”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Why?”

“Why?”

_“Why?”_

“I don’t fucking know why!” He’d yelled, the last time that they had ever let him do an interview. “It just sits there, unmoving, unfeeling, and every now and then the stupid thing vanishes and then comes back. If I knew why, everyone would know.”

The public had mostly forgotten him, and professors used him as an example to their students of the perils of fame. It wasn’t fame that was his problem, it was the fucking star.

He stopped looking through his telescope. At the very least, all the interviews and talk show appearances had given him the funds to build his very own observatory. And all he used it for was to start at that impossible star, and hate it with every fibre of his being.

It rarely blinked more than once a night, and did so with enough regularity that he had figured out a formula to perfectly predict them. Some almost worthless journal had been the only one willing to publish it, after the excitement had died down and his name tarnished.

Idris sipped at a beer from the bar fridge he kept by the telescope, and thought about the enterprising biographer who’d tried to chart his life. Unfortunately for the poor man, Idris didn’t have a dramatic life story that would sell a million copies, and then win an Oscar for whoever played him in the movie adaptation.

No wife and kids he left behind to pursue the cold hard truth, no fights for desperately needed grant money. He’d spotted it three years out of university, on his first post, and he’d been trying to figure out what it was since.

The kid had given him up as a bad job soon after they’d run out of beer the second night he was there. He’d taken a look at Blink, at least. Everyone always did, they thought it was uncanny how good he was at knowing when it happened. _Look at the fucking formula_ , he always wanted to say. _I’m not psychic, it’s mathematics!_ But, as usual, no one wanted the maths.

He threw the now empty bottle in a beautiful arc, a perfect parabola, right into the recycling bin. Or, rather, it hit the wall just above the recycling bin and shattered, showering the bin liner with shards of brown glass. He liked the noise. It something that didn’t happen at all in space, and at this point that was enough for him to like it.

An alarm went off on his phone, and he fitted his eye to the telescope again. Right on schedule, the light from that far-off sun stopped before it reached the glass of his telescope, or the back of his eye. Except, unlike usual, this time it didn’t come back as quickly. Usually the blinks happened at incredibly regular intervals, one second or two, this one had lasted five already.

Idris muttered to himself, and started typing something onto a nearby keyboard. The monitoring equipment that recorded every blink was set to shut off automatically after a few seconds, he had to turn it back on again to record the whole thing.

“What are you doing?” he asked the star softly, the bitterness of a wasted decade of life ebbing away in the face of something finally, blessedly different. Ten second passed, then thirty, and before he knew it there were a full five minutes since it had vanished.

“Where are you? What? No!” Had it collapsed in on itself? Was this how the mystery that formed the core of his entire life was going to end? With the star finally blinking out, disappearing forever from the sky and leaving no trace of what had caused it to act so strangely. Not even a supernova, not even a wave goodbye.

His jaw hung open, and he slumped back into his chair. Nothing on the monitors. Nothing through the telescope. Ten minutes, and it was gone.

Except, of course, for the giant burning red patch that appeared in its place, blotting out dozens of other, normal stars.

Not willing to risk his precious eyesight, Idris tore outside, onto the well-mown lawn that covered the little space he had besides the observatory and his little house. He stared up at the great meteorite that seemed to be headed right for him, and decided that this was what he got for swearing at space for ten years.

He opened his arms wide, ready to meet his end at the hands of his obsession, when the great streak started to cool, and obviously slow. To any other astronomer, it would seem that the thing had burnt out in the atmosphere. Idris knew otherwise.

He knew, because there was a great fucking spaceship decelerating as it came down towards him. The thing was entirely black, and on the top of it he could see that there were some strange, solar-panel like things. Idris had never been involved in rocketry, so he had no expertise on his side, but he guessed that those must power it. And- maybe- had something to do with his blinking star. Perhaps he was just hopeful, but it had come from exactly the right spot.

With none of the slow grace that science fiction had led him to expect, the ship positioned itself above his house, and locked itself to the ground. Something not at all humanoid, with twelve eyes, some of which were on the ends of limbs, and roving ears that he barely recognised as such, made its way down from the ship. It floated down, and the part of Idris that loved science fiction was gratified.

The thing landed in front of him, a little shorter than Idris at its full height, and resembling a tortoise with more than just retractable legs and head. Its eyes looked at him, all of the different ones pivoting to stare directly at him. And then, in unison, they started to blink.

“It’s Morse code. The fucking thing knows Morse code.” Reliving the boredom of a few childhood summers, Idris jotted down the code. Before he even tried to decode it, a thought sent him rummaging through his notes to find the general form of his formula for predicting the blinks, with the lengths written beside it. Idris realised that it wasn’t just a formula but a fucking pattern. A code. They’d been blinking it at him.

 

.-- . / .... . .- .-. / -.-- --- ..- / .-- . / .- .-. . / -.-. --- -- .. -. --.

 

We hear you.

We are coming.


End file.
